Incognito

J.K.Rowling was ‘outed’ last week as crime writer Robert Gailbraith. She stood little chance of keeping her secret. Robert Gailbraith aka JK, but at least she tried. In some ways I feel sorry for her. She could have rested on her Harry Potter laurels and not put pen to paper again. But in the end, she is a writer, and that’s what writers do: they write. Some years ago I gave up writing, but the urge was still there, albeit suppressed. Then my wife asked me to write a best-seller for her. She encouraged me and the result was I picked myself up mentally, dusted off my e-pen and set about writing again. The result was six more novels, all traditionally published. No, I didn’t make the best-seller list; far from it, but I did enjoy some heady days last year at the top of the Amazon free best-seller list. I can’t empathise with JK because I’ve no idea what it must be like to live in her shoes, but I can understand the frustration in a way. No doubt she wanted to test herself as an unknown, but her name had to come out in the end. All I need now is for a rumour to go round that Dan Brown is really Michael Parker. It could do wonders for my sales figure.

Last Monday I had a promotion on for HELL’S GATE. I’ve yet to see the results, but I suspect there was not much of a change in my averages. Admittedly it was a low price promo, but it was a promo nevertheless. I have another one, same website, for THE EAGLE’S COVENANT at the end of this month. I try to limit my budget for promotion and marketing and that is probably why my results are not as grand as I would like them to be, but each lift I get in my Amazon rankings is always welcome. I check my graph each day and it zig-zags like the teeth of a rip-saw. But with some of the titles the overall change shows a slight increase, week on week. I’ll keep pushing though, and I’ll try not to go into raptures when I see a huge jump.

I’m making steady progress with my current novel. I’m up to 30,000 words, having added 3000 during the week. My aim is a minimum of 500 words each day. It doesn’t seem many, but there will be days (like today) when I won’t add anything, and another day when I might add 1500. So the average will be 500, and that should take me to my target of 100,000 words by the end of the year. Wish me luck!